There are many kinds of fear. There is the one felt by adolescents; the fear of being left out, of missing out. We yearn to find out what is happening. [[Gabriel Chevallier]]'s alter ego Jean Dartemont had just such a fear. He tells us that was why he went to war. "I went against all my convictions, but still of my own free will -- not to fight but out of curiosity: to see." Dartemont goes on to tell us that by the time he signed up, "The war was already a few months old and I was beginning to fear that it might end before I got there... since this was would be the most remarkable spectacle of the age --- I would not want to miss it."

France had no recent history of war in that beautiful summer of 1914. Apart from some elderly veterans, it was an unknown. Those who flocked to sign up did not know what was involved. There was fear in the hearts of the women who watched and wept at this rush to battle, but the menfolk didn't yet understand why.

As so often happens in war, Dartemont's unit spent a long period in training, then time behind the lines, so it wasn't until mid 1915 that his battalion actually saw the enormity of war. We had just marched over the crest of a hill, and suddenly there before us lay the front line, roaring with all its mouths of fire, blazing like some infernal factory where monstrous crucibles melted human flesh into a bloody lava. We shuddered at the thought that we were nothing but more coal to be shovelled into this furnace, that there were soldiers down there fighting against the storm of steel, the red hurricane that burned the sky and shook the earth to its foundations.... And so that nothing was missing from this macabre carnival, so that there was something to highlight the tragedy by its contrast, we saw rockets rising gracefully, like flowers of light, fading at the summit of this inferno and dropping down, dying, trailing stars. We were mesmerized by this spectacle, whose poignant meaning only the old hands knew. This was my first sight of the front line, my first sight of hell unleashed.Chevallier gives his protagonist time to think about this sight, time to absorb the sight of soldiers returning from the front "...all of them stained with blood and dirt...", before putting him into a fighting unit in September 1915. "The war had stopped being a game."

Fear was no longer an abstract concept. Sheer naked terror invaded Dartemont's soul, after he and those with him were hit by a salvo of fire. Panic booted us in the arse. Like tigers we leaped over the shells' smoking craters, rimmed with the wounded, and we leaped over the cries of our brothers, cries that came from the guts and strike at the guts, we leaped over pity, honour, shame, we eliminated all feeling, all that makes us human, according to moralists -- imposters who are not enduring an artillery bombardment and yet exalt courage! We were cowards and we knew it and we could be nothing else. The body was in charge and fear gave the orders. This is the strength of Chevallier's book. He had the courage to admit to this animal fear, to defy the jingoism that turned soldiers into heroes, willingly sacrificing their lives for others. It is a cry against war, against the utter senselessness of having a few generals and politicians decide the fate of tens of millions. Chevallier wasn't afraid to speak out against war, or to reveal its ugly repercussions: "...profiteers, arms dealers, the black market, denunciations, betrayals, firing squads, torture; not to mention famine, tuberculosis, typhus, terror, sadism."

It took Chevallier five years to write this book, from 1925 to 1930. It is a memoir that reads like a novel, but it is more than that. At times a polemic, at times a personal narrative, it always reads with an immediacy that is riveting. Earlier this year I read [[Gert Ledig]]'s [The Stalin Front], a novel of World War II, and had the same reactions. Together these books cover two of the largest cataclysms of the twentieth century. Despite their passion, nothing has been learned; young men and now women too, still troop off to war, older men from earlier wars still lead them, still others praise "the fallen". Their fear is of uttering the truth, of speaking the ugly words: killed, mutilated, orphaned, widowed. Evidence for this lies in the suppression of [Fear] by the authorities in 1939, at the start of that second great twentieth century cataclysm. It was not published again until 1951.

Wow!! This one is an unrecognized classic of the military novel genre that should be better known! Jean Dartemont, the eager young Frenchman, joins the French army in 1915 against the Germans. He is quickly disillusioned as to blind patriotism and to army life: there is no glory to be found here except that for the high officers, who grab it at the expense of the ranks. All to be found here in the trenches is only mind-numbing monotony and overwhelmingly, the desire to stay alive. Mostly the men are in a state of stasis waiting for the other side to start something. Fear, Anxiety, and Terror are Dartemont's constant companions, just as they accompany every other 'poilu' [common soldier].

We are taken through his whole military career from enlistment to the Armistice. It details Dartemont's coming upon dead Germans for the first time and his shock at how the bodies have been blown apart. In his first battle, in which he kills no one he is wounded enough to send to the hospital. Nurses there care for gruesome, grisly wounds and are disappointed there are no tales of glorious exploits. None of the patients have any to tell them. On convalescent leave, his father can't or won't understand the war from the common soldiers' viewpoint. Neither do civilians in general. Return to the front takes him either to the fighting or behind the lines as 'runner' [delivering messages under fire] or making and checking topographic maps and enemy positions, many times also under enemy bombardment. We were given an extended horrendous description of the Battle of Chemins de Dames. Letters home express what the home folks want to hear; they can't accept the soldiers' truths. As the war grinds wearily on, the despairing Dartemont writes:

"No end seems in sight. Every day men fall. Every day we have less trust in our own luck....[Some] old hands who have been there from the start believe themselves immune, invulnerable, but most believe any luck will turn....Here everything is planned for killing...and yet we want to stay alive....the horror of war resides in growing anxiety: continuation, repetition of danger." Death can be seemingly random.

This book is just as valid today as it was when it was written [1930]. I thought of Dartemont as an Everyman figure, a little man caught in brutality over which he had no control. The author pulled no punches in description; everyday events and fighting were not prettified, down to telling us about the soldiers' lice-ridden clothes and bodies. Dartemont's story and the emotions he and other soldiers feel and express so forcefully could be those of any soldier in any war; this novel just happens to be set in World War I. It is a powerful, savage anti-war, novel/memoir. It excoriates the brutal, rigid military system in toto and its hidebound officer hierarchy. Common soldiers give voice to their concerns. Even some few Germans chime in, with the same sentiments. Awarded the Croix de Guerre and made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, Chevallier drew on some of his own experiences; I'm sure that's why the insights and the 'action' were so unforgettable and so vivid. Some of the scenes were absolutely chilling and made my blood run cold. ( )

"Would you like to know the chief occupation in war, the only one that matters: I was afraid."

What sets Fear apart from most other autobiographical war novels is the author's stark and unapologetic admission that he was afraid, not just at the most intense moments of combat, but all the time. Nor was he in any way different from his fellow infantrymen. "We were cowards and we knew it and we could be nothing else. The body was in charge and fear gave the orders."

The narrator of the novel, Jean Dartemont, is a 19-year-old student when he is called up for military service late in 1914. His initial feelings of mixed apprehension and curiosity soon turn to disgust for the mechanical and irrational aspects of military life. Nine months later, its training complete, Dartemont's unit is marched down endless dusty roads into the combat zone. "We had just marched over the crest of a hill, and suddenly there before us lay the front line, roaring with all its mouths of fire, blazing like some infernal factory where monstrous crucibles melted human flesh into a bloody lava."

Dartemont serves the entire rest of the war as a private in the French infantry. His experiences run the gamut from front line combat, to boring rear area duty, to special assignments. At one point he is wounded, recuperates, spends a few days leave at home, and is then sent back to the front. The author's description of trench warfare is as intense, harrowing, and grisly as any you will find. Throughout it all there is fear, but most especially during intense artillery bombardments. "Every explosion of the bombardment hits me in the chest. I am ashamed of the sick animal wallowing in filth that I have become, but all my strings have snapped. My fear is abject. It makes me want to spit on myself."

The narrator's attitude toward war and those who make it is equally frank. Speaking of the beginning of the war, he says "In a few short days, civilisation was wiped out. In a few short days, all our leaders became abject failures. For their role, their only role that mattered, was precisely to prevent all this." Dartemont also blames the Church for "ordering me to kill my brothers," he blames women who insist that their sons and lovers come back as heroes, he blames flag-waving patriots who shame others into dying for empty causes like "national honour," and he blames the industrialists who make war for profit. But ultimately the fault is with mankind itself. "Men are sheep. This fact makes armies and wars possible."

Gabriel Chevallier did not publish his fictionalized war memoir until 1930, by which time memories of the horrors of war were fading into nostalgia and Europe was rearming for another war. His strident anti-war novel met with a cool reception, and was eventually removed from publication lest it impair French morale. Its subsequent obscurity is unfortunate, for Fear is one of the most powerful, vivid, and convincing war novels I have ever read. ( )

Gabriel Chevallier wrote a book that nobody wanted to read, about a moment in history nobody wanted to be reminded of and about a feeling everybody was ashamed of.

His war book “La Peur” (Fear) is not one of the more famous books coming out of la “Grande Guerre”. Chevallier’s name for instance has not the ring of an Ernst Junger or a Henri Barbusse, a Robert Graves or a Ford Maddox Ford, those better known writers who have attempted to capture the horrors of the trenches of World War I.I say attempted, because no words can ever bring home the sheer terror soldiers from all sides experienced in one of the most scandalous episodes of human history. Chevallier’s book however comes close…

Gabriel Chevallier ( 3 May 1895 – 6 April 1969 ) is better known for his satirical novel Clochemerle. It brought him commercial success and allowed him to live from his pen. “Fear” however was a book which had always been very difficult to find, until recently, when several editions appeared in the wake of commemorations of the war of 14-18. “Fear” never had the success it deserved. It appeared rather late, only in 1930, 12 years after the hostilities ended. Then, from 1939 on, the book was forbidden for obvious demoralizing reasons and then in the fifties, when it became available again, the public was a bit weary of wars and turned to other topics.

“La Peur” is an autobiographic book. It relates Chevallier’s experiences at the frontline during the first World War. The narrator, his thinly disguised alter ego, Jean Dartemont, survives the four year war, but does not come out of this hell unscathed.

A most shocking thing, the writer insists on, is that the enemy for the common soldiers are not the Germans. Dartemont will come face to face with enemy soldiers only twice in his four year of battle experience. The real enemy in the trench war is invisible. And this makes it so terrible. The enemy comes in the shape of constant bombing, of lethal grenade rains, of invisible snipers, of mines that maim horribly, of gasses that kill slowly, of tunnels that cave in. Rarely is there a face to face battle. Worse than the Germans, for the front soldier, is one’s own officer, the ones who order him out of the trenches, against all common sense, into the open, marching towards the certain Death of German machinegun fire.

The soldiers in the trenches are beastly scared, Chevallier reminds us constantly. No, that is not strong enough. Soldiers are imbued with fear, soaked in fear, devoured within with fear. They whine, they cry, they shit their pants, they vomit their guts each time the attack orders are imminent or that the rumble of another bombardment approaches.

Dartemont does not experience this senseless fear immediately on his first tour. Like most of the French, like most of the enthusiastic young men, he does not know what to expect when he marches for the first time to the warzone, his head full of patriotic and heroic ideas. That is until he has his baptism of fire.

The battle scenes are really terrible; the horror hypnotizing, as when the soldiers who survived recall how they “stepped in flesh” ( marchait dans la viande ) when they walked over hundreds of their dead companions from the previous attack waves. Several times Dartemont cannot believe he is safe, because he is so covered in blood and pieces of meat. Unfortunately it is not his blood, not his pieces of skin and he has to remain in the trenches.

After his bloody defloration, another logic takes over, the logic of survival at all costs.The more experienced soldiers are ingenious in these survival strategies. Self wounding, self maiming and suicide are easy solutions. Wounded, they are transported to the safe hinterland. They hide, they delay, they slow down their advance. They act constantly on the verge of desertion. Sometimes they do cross the line and are executed. Another trick is to interrupt fighting as soon as they can capture a German. It allows them to escort their happy prisoner to HQ behind the frontlines. Surrounding themselves with prisoners protects them from snipers too. Most crazy of all is when they come to an understanding with the poor buggers from the opposite trenches. They warn each other of coming fire so as to have the time to find cover and do dig in. The soldier’s common enemies are the officers. Not surprisingly that true communist ideals have sprouted from the horrors of the war…

It is not so long ago, it was the time of our grandfathers. Still we cannot fully comprehend to what horrors we send a whole generation of young men…

'Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the sea, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him.'

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"Fear is a classic of war literature, a book to place on the shelf with Storm of Steel, A Farewell to Arms, and Going After Cacciato. Jean Dartemont, the hero of Gabriel Chevallier's autobiographical novel, enters what was not yet known as World War I in 1915, when it was just beginning to be clear that a war that all the combatants were initially confident would move swiftly to a conclusion was instead frozen murderously in place. After enduring the horrors of the trenches and the deadly leagues of no-man's-land stretching beyond them, Jean is wounded and hospitalized. Away from the front, he confronts the relentless blindness of the authorities and much of the general public to the hideous realities of modern, mechanized combat. Jean decides he must resist. How? By telling the simple truth. Urged to encourage new recruits with tales of derring-do service, Jean does not mince words. What did he do on the battlefield? He responds like a man: "I was afraid." Acclaimed as "the most beautiful book ever written on the tragic events that blood-stained Europe" for five years, prosecuted on first publication as an act of sedition, Fear appears for the first time in the United States in Malcolm Imrie's poetic and prizewinning translation on the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the conflict with which the twentieth century came into its own. Chevallier's masterpiece remains, in the words of John Berger, "a book of the utmost urgency and relevance.""--… (more)